Recently Routledge published the edited volume titled Systemic Service Design, co-edited by me and Mari Suoheimo, Birger Sevaldson, and Sheng-Hung Lee. The 14 chapters cover a extreme range of emerging areas of study, many with fuzzy boundaries into applications that would never have been conceived as service, unless taking into account a bigger containing social system. As systemic design has expanded to develop and publish new service design studies, transition design research, socioecological, sociocultural, eco-territorial, and even spiritually-emergent design, the boundaries between these knowledge practices are blending and rhizomically connecting. From power relations to system mapping, criminality to care systems, from aging to urban planning – I would say these studies are not defining a new field, so much as mediating a conversation that enriches the design for complex service needs with a deeper understanding of the systems in which they have developed.
Our schools were happy to support the OA publication (thanks Tec, MIT, AHO) and the entire set of chapters are available for free to all
As systems are wholes, services are dynamic parts within larger social system contexts – and have boundaries, with power and interaction crossings. In both of the two chapters I collaborated on
Innovations in theory and practice of systemic service design
Dancing with power dynamics inside systemic service design projects
We developed proposed frameworks for making sense of complex services, and the social power relations that emerge in both the design process with clients, their decisions for service interactions, and – we have to recognize, as our power over the time and experience of customers. Mari and I have extended the Bronfenbrenner model, which I refer to as a social ecology (to name an ecology as a system adds little, its either redundant to “ecology” or its not a system in the sense of a bounded whole. Also, whenever we over-define a construct as a “system” it draws out the technocrat in people who look for ways to control it. This is one of the power relations of concern). I have used this model often, and Design Journeys provides several perspectives, including the one with the “Chronosystem” which reminds us to model events over time. This particular representation has been developed from a 2017 (also Routledge book chapter) Social ecologies of flourishing: Designing conditions that sustain culture.
Now that we have expanded the boundaries of (systemic) service design to polities, cultures, organizations themselves, and sympoietic social forms, this almost unknown work on social flourishing might meet with better timing. After all, Nature just published an editorial on the (global) Human Flourishing initiative, one which my school Tec de Monterrey was deeply involved in.
Steps to an Ecology of Services
Now, the informed design academic must know about service systems theory. The foundational work from Vargo and Lusch (on the service dominant logic, marketing side) and Paul Maglio & Jim Spohrer (on the sociotechnical side) in the first wave of service systems science, 2008-2018. These are some of the most influential contributions to the service marketing-systems nexus. The second wave may have been service ecosystems (Vink, etc.) There is work, reviews on “the evolution from service systems to service ecosystems,” which gets to my earlier point (an ecology does not require designation as a system).
However, I do not see this as an evolution “toward” as in progress, but as a discovered perspective. We might also recognize that ecological services will resist design – because these are typically embedded in public sector institutional ecologies (a much older concept) that provide services within administrative provisioning, not product-service markets. I’m not even convinced the principles of SDL function in most public sector arrangements, at least not in North American service ecosystems. I don’t think we consider tax services as value cocreation, or the many frustrating experiences with government services we often have. This is the subject of a new discussion, but its a side-comment on the surreptitious notion of “evolution as progressive” implied in the review. I think service ecosystems are different than managed services under SDL.
First Steps
I think the first recognition of the systemics of service, that I have found, was from Harold Nelson, co-author of The Design Way and one of the small team that cocreated the SDRN (now SDA). Harold was ISS president in 2002 and was working on a systemics of service, integrating design thinking – then. See President’s address: Being in Service: Lip Service? Room Service? Self Service? Protective or Military Service? Social or Public Service? Full Service?
Harold makes a distinction from this era that we might remember as foundational:
The interrelationship that binds, animates, and defines a design capable system is service. Service is a contractual relationship where purpose and intention is blended with instrumental skill and judgement.
As Service Dominant Logic was formulated in the early 2000’s, there were parallel projects in redefining service science, including IBM Research (Jim Spohrer) and the academic teams at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Jim Kijima) and others. See: Service System Science (Springer, 2014)
A significant body of work was developed in Prof Kijima’s 5-year Service Systems research initiative, perhaps overlooked because of the rapid “evolution” of service design, and that it was developed within the systems science community, which is not connected like the business research (e.g., SDL). I submit that systems science ages less than design studies, and that these foundational works were highly coherent, and remain useful and largely unexplored.
Within service design, there was constant development of the field and growth at the SDN conferences to which I confess I did not attend. (I was an active conference participants from 1988-2008, but after my long-term relationship with RSD, I don’t see other people as much). The SDN proposed a Touchpoint issue in 2021, Service Design and Systems Thinking, that was at the time Kristel Van Ael and I collaborating on Design Journeys. That Touchpoint – with 21 articles -was likely the first collection in a definitive area of systemic service design (it helped that Josina Vink as a co-editor).
More to come…
Systemic Service Design seems to have reached a fusion point this year, and I hope to see more research in the RSD Symposium and Contexts journal.
